PARTISAN REVIEW
13
And some guys were speaking in their sleep
and others were laughing in their sleep
and others singing in their sleep
bla bla bla - qua qua qua - hop hop hop - ta ta ta - tra
la la -
it was beautiful!
yes . ..
we all had beautiful dreams in our heads ... blue dreams ...
like waves,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-. ,-.
~~~~~~-----~~~~
Sanford Chernoff
A MATTER OF TIME
I was down in the front row of Loew's Oriental, eating a
chicken salad sandwich, when my father died. That's the way I re–
member it. And to this day, the thought of it makes me itch. Not that
I believe for a minute that I would scratch any less if I had been
somewhere else at the time. At the time there was no place else. Not
for me. Not then. Then it was all the same to me.
It
was all chicken
salad sandwiches, breast, and dreams. And death had no more part
in those dreams than I had out of them.
I never looked in the coffin. We bear a resemblance I'm told,
though I couldn't see it. Not yet. He was a small, hairless man in,
as
he liked to say, women's clothes. It was handbags actually, that
he sold six days a week, in one of those avid little stores along Four–
teenth Street. Sundays he slept late and, if my brother wasn't around,
would catch with me behind the house. Ed was the talented one. He
had pitched a two hitter his first year in "high school, and my father
said he was on his way.
It
was just a matter of time.
Less
than a year after the funeral Ed enlisted in the C9aSt guard.
My
mother didn't do anything to stop him. But she cried the night
he left and drank so, I remember, I had to help her to bed. She
wouldn't let me take off her shoes and, I recall, cursed me in the
oame of my father.
